But instead, she awoke alone and sweating, shivering, in the middle of the night, too terrified to move an arm outside the blanket to turn on the light, lest some wayward zombie sink his teeth into her soft, live flesh. She awoke too guilty about the fear and revulsion she'd felt towards him in the dream to feel okay about feeling scared awake. She awoke too miserable to feel sorry for herself. And then that passed and she did feel sorry for herself. She felt plenty sorry for herself, and sorry for him too, and she hoped he wasn't a zombie, doomed and damned to wander in search of comestible human brains, and then she remembered he'd been cremated and was just ashes now and a bone fragment or two and maybe a silver filling. And he was in a vase in a glass case in Hamilton, Ontario, and not on a gurney, not in a suburban ranch-style house, not anywhere. Unless she believed Psychic Sue, in which case he was behind her left shoulder most of the time, but that didn't seem right either, because wouldn't he just hang out with Rebecca instead? Why her? Psychic Sue was obviously not to be trusted, she was obviously just telling her what she wanted to hear, because if Psychic Sue actually knew what she was about, then where was her man, goddamnit? Where, for once and for all, was her Cheshire Cat grinning man, the man of her putative dreams, picket fence, dog, kids and all?
In any event Nathan had continued to appear to her in dreams. After a month or two, he morphed from a zombie into merely a dead person. In one such appearance, he took her for a ride beneath the stars in his go-kart, and when it was time to go, he said, “I'm going to teach you some math, now,” and Leah looked at him steadily while he unscrewed the top of his head, then unscrewed the top of hers, tilted over her and poured pink, and purple and blue numbers from his skull into hers. “Thanks,” she said, before climbing out of the go-kart and watching it ascend, Nathan aboard, to the stars. “Thanks,” she called, waving after it.
In each subsequent dream, he became less dead. Once he rescued her from a malevolent water park and told her things he knew about her own strength and resilience that brought her to tears, tears that were still on her cheeks when she awoke. She lay in the stillness for some time that night, touching the tears on her cheeks and willing
him to come back, to come back to her when she was awake. But she knew, at the heart of it, that she was a little afraid of him, too. After all, he was a ghost.
He didn't appear to her. Not that night. And not for many nights to come. He came in dreams, with the usual frequency, and each time he got healthier looking. With the exception of the water park dream, he'd always show up in some kind of wheeled cart, most recently a hay wagon. He was the most like a live person in that dream. Dressed all in black, and refusing to make eye contact, and, frankly, a bit crabby, but in the dream, she believed he was alive. She knew he was special in some way, troubled in some way, but she also knew he was in the world. She hadn't seen him be that way, a participant in the world, since six months before his death. She woke up feeling joy, and that's when she saw him. He was sitting in the chair beside her bed watching her.
She tried to scream, but couldn't, as if she were still sleeping. She managed a kind of strangled cry, but he sat impassively. He flickered in and out, as if he were a radio with bad reception, but it was him for sure. Not because it looked like him, necessarily, Leah would explain, or try to explain, to Charlotte later that day, but just because it WAS him. She couldn't be clearer about it. Just, she knew it was Nathan, she knew he was there, she knew it was for real.
And after that, he was always with her. At first, having him around was great. Leah felt like she could take incredible chances, and Nathan would look out for her. It was a feeling she had of invincibility and divine intervention in her stupid, messy life. She tested this feeling by stepping into the road without looking both ways, and was exhilarated when cars screeched to a halt for her. Charlotte pointed out that this was likely because she lived in Halifax, where drivers would stop if a pedestrian so much as looked at the curb, and not because her dead brother was watching over her. But Charlotte was occasionally tediously attached to empirical evidence, as Leah did not hesitate to point out, and Charlotte was hard pressed to argue with her on that front.
Most of the time, Nathan kept to himself. She couldn't always see him, but she had a sense that he was there. And most of the time, she found it comforting. She experimented a little with talking to him, but she wasn't sure what she should tell him or what he'd want to
know. She'd asked him things occasionally, like why he was with her and not at home with Rebecca, but Nathan would flicker out under questioning, and Leah didn't like to upset him, so mostly she didn't say anything.
She thought about explaining where her head had been those last six months he'd been alive, but every time she tried to tell him, it came out wrong. Nathan would just hold his hands up in front of him each time another of her ham-fisted explanations started. He'd hold his hands up and look away, look down, off to the side. It was disconcerting. Leah remembered reading somewhere that if you were visited by a ghost and you wanted them to leave, you just held your hands up and said,
no
. That's what it looked like Nathan was doing. It was upsetting for both of them, and eventually, she stopped trying.
Her failure ate away at her though, in a way it hadn't before he'd started hanging around her. She did her best to put it out of her mind, but she could feel him standing behind her, or moving around her almost all the time, and it was difficult to forget something that had proved to be so formative. It was starting to make her edgy, keeping it inside, but eventually Leah got busy with more recipe work, and that made it easier to forget what she was convinced she had to forget.
And then, his presence was upsetting in other ways. She could feel him tensing up every time she drank a cup of coffee even though she'd switched to decaf after her visit from Psychic Sue. She bought sweet potatoes and left them under the counter till they smelled like vodka. Then she'd put them in the compost, go to the grocery store and buy more. She wore black turtlenecks in spite of him, but every time she did, she felt cross and out of sorts for no good reason.
She'd start to masturbate, then imagine him on the chair beside her bed and stop short, too ashamed to carry on.
“And god forbid I should bring anyone home,” she bitched to Charlotte on the phone one day. “I mean, how can I? How can I have sex in my room while my dead brother watches?”
“Hmmm, that's a toughie,” Charlotte said. “Honestly, I don't know what to tell you about that one, except that, oh, he's a ghost, and you're alive, and sweetheart, a woman has needs, you know what I'm saying?”
“Yeah, I know what you're saying,” Leah said, twisting the cord
around her finger till the flesh at the fingertip went white. “I'm too guilty to masturbate, remember?”
“It's not perfect,” Charlotte admitted. “But what are you going to do?”
“Excellent question,” Leah said. “I wish I knew.”
The next day, at the library, Leah put aside her research on Indian cookery. She leaned back in her chair and sighed. The library was usually a refuge for her. She easily lost herself there in the lemony smell of well-thumbed paper and the murmuring of street kids warming up in the magazine room. But she couldn't concentrate. She had Nathan on her mind.
She got up from her chair, leaving her stack of books, her fine tipped sharpie, her notebook. The various tools of her trade. Her scarf hung on the back of her chair, a deflated, forgotten streamer. At the computer terminal she hesitated for just a minute, her fingers itching over the keyboard. It wasn't logical, what she was about to do. And yet, what choice did she have? She looked furtively over each shoulder. And then she typed “ghosts.”
The screen filled with titles. Kids' books, volumes of maritime ghost stories, something called “Ghost of a Chance,” which seemed to be a romance novel with a paranormal twist. Leah refined her search.
Ghosts, nonfiction
, she typed.
Dealing with them
.
This time, there were fewer titles. She scratched down the call numbers of a few on a scrap of paper, cleared the computer screen and went into the stacks to take a look.
The first one she put her hands on was a fat hardcover with no dustjacket. The spine was green, with black letters. “How To Deal With Ghosts.”
“That's to the point.” Leah muttered as she drew it from the shelf. The pages inside were buttery soft, polished by hands and time.
How To Deal With Ghosts,
the title page read,
by Peter Pietropaulo.
The chapters were equally straightforward.
What are ghosts; Why do they stay on earth; How do I know if I have a ghost; How can I get rid of my ghost; What if I decide I want my ghost back?
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed,
she read.
And so it stands to reason that when we die, our energy remains. And sometimes, that energy
takes a ghostly human form. Sometimes we actually see spirits; they appear as flickering, thinner versions of themselves. Other times, we may simply feel their presence â a cold or hot spot in a room. We may hear spirits knocking or wailing. Some spirits manifest as an odour. Roses, sulphur, chicken soup, coffee. Lights may flicker. Appliances may turn on or turn off, on their own. We will discuss these symptoms of a haunting in depth in the chapter entitled “How do I know if I have a ghost?”
“No mystery there,” she said. “I definitely have a ghost. I'd say seeing him is a pretty clear symptom.” An old man who was browsing in the stacks gave her a dirty look and held his finger up to his mouth. “Sorry,” she whispered, then rolled her eyes when he turned away.
She hurried back to her seat with the book. Her stack of cook-books sat naggingly beside her notes. She had a deadline she'd already pushed three times. She cracked the cover of “How To Deal With Ghosts” and spent just enough time reading it to formulate a plan. At five o'clock, before Joan shooed her out and locked the doors behind her, she borrowed the book and stowed it in her bag, alongside her recipe notes, her plan for freeing Nathan humming in her mind as she rushed from the library.
“I have to tell Nathan his story,” she told Charlotte over a very spicy caesar at the Fish Tank.
“Surely to god he knows his own story,” Charlotte said. “He's a ghost for the love of Mike, don't they have access to everything?”
“Not according to this book,” Leah said. “Not if they're just hanging around. It means they're a bit lost, a bit confused. I mean, if he were haunting his own house, that'd be understandable, you know? He should want to be close to Rebecca, he should want to watch over her. But he's thousands of kilometres off course even for that. Let alone for just settling easily into the afterlife.”
“What about the all-night card parties?” Charlotte said, “what about the endless meatballs?”
Leah grimaced, sipped her drink. “Yeah. You know, I think I extrapolated that stuff.”
“Extrapolated,” Charlotte said, blinking. “You mean the pennies from heaven are not falling from some cosmic Rummoli game?”
“Are you making fun of me now?” Leah asked. “I can never tell if you're fucking making fun of me.” She turned on her high chair.
“Can I get another drink?” she said to the passing barkeep. “I'm going to need at least another drink, here.”
Nelson nodded and looked at Charlotte, who nodded back. “Yeah,” she said, “looks like it's fixing to be a long night.”
“Look,” Leah said, as patiently as she could. “I don't know about the meatballs, okay? I don't know about the white clothes, and I don't know about the heavenly Rummoli game. I would like to think things work that way, but I can't be certain. When I really think about it, I'm pretty sure all Psychic Sue told me was that when he got there he was sick, and they looked after him till he got better.”
“Who're they?” Charlotte asked, slurping caesar through a straw. She coughed. “Gah. Spicy.”
“I don't know who they are. Could be my grandparents and my aunt Mary, could be angelic paramedics, could be God himself for that matter. Sue didn't elaborate and I didn't ask. She did say Mary came to get him, because my grandmother was getting things ready. I took that to mean meatballs and Rummoli. I don't think that's out of line, frankly, and I have to say, it's an image I like. So, I don't know. If that's what the afterlife was like and I had the option, that's where I'd stay, especially if my grandmother was doing the cooking.”
“Maybe Nathan didn't have the option.
“Maybe not indeed,” Leah said. “This is what I'm thinking.
“Why don't you just ask him?” Charlotte asked.
Leah shook her head. “Nah, he doesn't really like questions. He puts his hands up like I'm the paparazzi or something.”
Charlotte hooted. She looked around. “Is he here now?”
“You gotta quit it with that,” Leah said, shaking her head.
“Come on, Leah. Just tell me, is he here right now?”
Leah took a deep breath, tilted her head down, looked at her friend from under her eyebrows. “Charlotte,” she said.
“Just tell me, and then I won't ask anymore.”
“He's not a puppy, Charlotte, chrissakes, have a little respect.”
“I do, dude,” Charlotte said. “I have plenty of respect. But frankly, if I'm going to listen to anymore talk about how you can't even jerk off in case your ghost is watching, well, I'm going to want some pay-back. So is he here or isn't he?”
Leah laughed, looked over her shoulder. “He's sitting back there,”
she said, jerking her thumb toward the empty stools at the bar. “And he doesn't look happy.”
Charlotte took a long swallow, traced letters on the table in the condensation her glass left there. “Do you think he ever fucks shit up?” she asked.